A Correlational Study On The Learning Style Based English Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Academic Achievements For Art-major Students

From 2004 to 2014, many universities focus on an enrollment expansion of art-major students, with an increasing rate as high as 60%. At the same time, the number of art- major candidates increases approximately 30 times compared with the number of decreasing students. Consequently, such a two-way growth has led to a steep rise in the number of art-major students. Due to their special character and major, their acquisition of English learning is different from that of other students. Therefore, during the process of the English teaching and learning, teachers should concentrate on enriching their vocabularies, which can consolidate their basis and promote their scores. Although many teachers and researchers have done a lot of study on learning style and learning strategies, few people has done research on art-major students.Therefore, this thesis adopts SAS made by Oxford to classify the learning styles of art students majoring in Painting and Music. Based upon the learning styles of the students, six scales on vocabulary learning strategies are applied to survey and analyze students’ strategies in vocabulary acquisition and test their vocabularies at the same time. After the analysis of data with the help of statistics method, the distribution situation of students’ learning styles majoring in Painting and Music is shown clearly. In cognitive learning style, they incline to the characteristics of intuitive learning strategy. In personality learning style, they possess the extroverted characteristics. But in sensory learning style, students in painting major incline to be visual, while music students are auditory. Based upon the learning styles of the art-majored students, the results of the vocabulary learning strategies presented that all the art students prefer emotional strategy. But the painting students like memory and cognitive strategies, while the music students put their preferences on social and compensatory strategies.According to the vocabulary comparison between the experimental group and the control group before and after modifying the vocabulary learning strategies, this study finds that students with different learning styles intend to make different vocabulary learning strategies and that if the learning strategies match their thinking or learning styles, the learners will be more successful and improve their English level. It also illustrates art majors should use certain kinds of strategies when learning English vocabulary. For example, guiding the painting majors to use the strategy of mind map and guiding the music majors to use the strategy of listening and speaking will arouse students’ learning interest to achieve more ultimately.